After nearly fifteen years with ESPN.com and three with Vox Media's SB Nation, Rob Neyer recently joined FOXSports.com as Senior Baseball Editor. In his new position, Rob will continue writing regularly while also guiding FOXSports.com's new section featuring the best baseball content on the Web.

Articles

… related to Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups

Switching LF’ers

by Rob Neyer

Nobody’s complained much about the Mets chapter, which is a bit surprising because . . . well, because Mets fans tend to
have grown up in or near New York, and people who grew up in or near New York tend to complain when they think they know
something you don’t.

Basically, there’s been only one complaint that I’ve seen more than once, and it goes something like this . . . “How inhell could you rate Sleepy Kevin McReynolds ahead of Cleon Jones?”

And you know what? It’s a fair question.

As I mentioned in the book or should have mentioned in the book, I generally went with quality over quantity. That is, given a choice between a player with three good seasons and a player with six adequate seasons, I’ll take the guy with the good seasons.

This is a different situation, though, as both Jones and McReynolds have roughly the same number of good seasons, considering that McReynolds played fewer seasons in New York than Jones did. Here’s the Win Shares for all of McReynolds’s six seasons in New York, next to Jones’s six best seasons, and with each player’s seasons listed in descending order of Win Shares
(got all that?).

Most Mets fans would give Jones a big edge when considering his best season (1969) against McReynolds’s
best (1988). After all, Jones batted .340 and the Mets won the World Series. But McReynolds enjoyed a solid year
with the stick, too. And while Jones was great in the 1969 National League Championship Series, he didn’t do much at all
in the World Series. Meanwhile, McReynolds played well in the 1988 NLCS (which the Mets lost). I suppose I can see the
argument for Jones having a better year, but it’s so close that I don’t feel comfortable giving the nod to Jones just
because I’m supposed to.

But looking at their six best seasons with the Mets, Jones does just a bit better. And for comparison’s sake, six seasons
is all we can look at, because that’s how many seasons McReynolds played in New York.

In his first two trials, Jones didn’t do anything, but did well in ’66 after earning an everyday job.

Here’s what it comes down to . . . Excluding his first two seasons, in which he hardly played, Cleon Jones averaged
14 Win Shares per season for the Mets, and McReynolds averaged nearly 22 Win Shares per season for the Mets.

Should I hold Jones’s poor seasons against him, merely because he happened to stick with the team for significantly more
seasons than McReynolds did?

Well, I did. But if I were writing the book today, I’d probably move Jones ahead of McReynolds, because of those two14‘s. When initially comparing these two, I looked at Jones’s bad years but ignored McReynolds’s bad year (after
two seasons off in Kansas City, he returned in 1994).

And that wasn’t fair. Cleon Jones is the greatest left fielder in New York Mets history.